All Season Dining — Day One

Standard

Today was opening day at World of Fun. We went, and rode one ride. Due to church book club, we weren’t able to get there until quite a bit after opening, and then there were significant lines for most of the rides, longer than we like to wait.

Today was also the first day where our All Season Dining Plan was in effect at Worlds of Fun. Which, actually, is why we decided to go today, more than for the opening of the park itself.

I had blogged on this last fall, but we paid the $80.50 additional each on our season pass renewals to get the all season dining plan at Worlds of Fund. That is $322 for eating at the park. Of course, right now, it costs an additional $96 each to add this option, so the price is already climbing. So now I am ready to track exactly how much dining we do, and how quickly we make back our investment.

It isn’t easy deciding exactly how to track this information. Today for lunch we roamed the park, locating various participating restaurants, but decided to stop at Coasters, since it wasn’t busier than normal, and we hadn’t eaten theme more than once before. It is usally very busy so we don’t expect to get in there easily in the future.

The register tape we got when we ran up was very crazy. It would do something like $14 for a basket, minues a promotional amount, and then show an amount of $6.69, add some tax and say we had paid the total. So I am unclear how they are allocationing the price/cost of the items from their end.

But for us, I decided to take the single item prices from the nemue — what we would have paid without the dining plan, and use those as our savings calculation. So for lunch we have the below table:

LUNCH

Restaurant

Entree

Price

Side

Price

Total

Jonathan

Coasters

BBQ Bacon Cheddar Burger

$7.99

Onion Rings

$5.59

$13.58

Betsy

Coasters

Cheeseburger

$7.59

Onion Rings

$5.59

$13.18

Carly

Coasters

Chicken BLT

$7.59

Onion Rings

$5.59

$13.18

Nathan

Coasters

Chicken Tenders

$8.99

French Fries

$4.99

$13.98

Total

$53.92

At this stage it looks like about 6-7 meals is all it should take to make up what it costs to purchase the plan. Of course, since normally we wouldn’t have spent that money, the real question, is when does it replace its value in food we would have normally purchase in the grocery budget that we don’t have to purchase. I don’t think we can really track an easy point for that. So I’ll just continue to show how much we “save” througought the season.

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UPDATE: 9:30 P.M. — We just came back from our second run to the park, and our dinner meal course. See below for the food tally:

DINNER

Restaurant

Entree

Price

Side

Price

Total

Jonathan

Auntie Anne’s

Pretzel Dog

$5.99

Cheese Dip

$1.29

$7.28

Betsy

Auntie Anne’s

Original Pretzel

$5.59

Sweet Glaze

$1.29

$6.88

Carly

Auntie Anne’s

Pretzel Dog

$5.99

Cheese Dip

$1.29

$7.28

Nathan

Auntie Anne’s

Mini Cinnamon Pretzel Bites

$5.59

$5.59

Total

$27.03

GRAND TOTAL

80.95

Notice that in one day’s time of two meals we have consumed the retail equivalent of one entire person’s fee. So in just 4 days we might “recoup” all 4 fees.

The Caveat, of course, is without the plan we wouldn’t be spending any money to buy food at those prices. So, will we consume less food off the grocery budget, and will this fill our eating out complement for the summer — will we want to eat out for awhile after we get done with this experiment?